The level scaling stuff in combat is something that sounds like it will annoy me greatly :/ . I honestly wish weapons and armour wouldn’t scale with level at all – I’d prefer an XCOM like approach where there are just three or four levels of the weapons, independent of the wielder, but reliant on technology (magical or non-magical). Any further buffs etc to the gear would be based on crafting or modifications. Maybe even a Mount & Blade like progression system would be nicer – or heck, even Hearts of Iron, where you can research better things or variants of tanks, but can also tweak each variant further with certain trade-offs.

With Borderlands 2 the randomness and level based gear led to a few hours being spent just looking at stats, which isn’t really all that fun after a while. I’d also rather not have to dispose off weapons because they’re suddenly too weak to do damage.

Of course, i don’t know how these things would fit with the character’s stats increases. But i think that the weapon’s effectiveness should depend more on the wielder’s ability and skill (either player directed or abstracted via stats) and not because sword A2 is higher level than A1. Maybe if it’s made of better materials or through a more advanced process, or something.

Anyway, my rant’s over. Hehe.

Now I’ll read your article!

I’ve surprised myself with how much I’ve enjoyed this game so far, I had a very similar experience with the first one where I got to the final act and then got frustrated and never completed it.

So far I’m still on the first island, but I’m really glad to hear about the respecs. It actually annoys me when you get developers that insist on not providing respec options even though it’s possible to totally screw yourself 20 or so hours in with no recourse but to start over (was it Pillars or Wasteland that did this?). This is the thing for me that Diablo 3 got 100% right, to the extent that I actually had a lot of fun just experimenting with different approaches. Why all RPGs don’t do this seems ridiculous.

The only thing that really bugs me so far is that there’s clearly a lot of effort that’s gone into different “classes” but which are absolutely meaningless once you’ve created a character (or adopted a follower). It seems very strange that they went to the trouble of doing that. There’s not even anything in the UI or anywhere that tells you which option you actually chose.

We’re still not out of Fort Joy yet, because my wife is a compulsive thief/looter, so every corner has to be explored, and every NPC has to be robbed if we can pull it off. Speaking of looting, the sneak/thief pickpocketing ability seems a bit OP, but it was that way in the last game too.

The only thing I’m not enjoying is the new “ablative” armor system, split between physical and magic armor. It means you can’t deploy a crowd control status effect at the start of combat, because you have to burn through one of the armor types before environmental or magic status effects can happen. And then, once an enemy’s armor is gone, it’s usually more efficient to use direct physical or magic damage for a quick kill. It sounds more “tactical” in theory to have to burn through armor, but in practice it means we’re using less crowd control spells than we did in the previous game. It also tends to steer party design towards physical-heavy or magic-heavy builds to focus on one of the two armor types (although we’re avoiding that kind of cheese intentionally, because mixed party builds are more fun).

Anyway, that’s a minor peeve. The rest of the game is very good.

Anyway, it feels that the level gating/balancing here and making everything about killing things for XP potentially makes it a lot more tiring. Part of gating XP by progress through quests is to allow bypassing and non-combat solutions to be viable. I don’t think that the common solution we’re at now isn’t quite the the complete one yet though – I think RPG design needs to find a way to let you level up that isn’t gated either by handing in a quest specifically, or killing things, AND not unbalance things too much whatever way people approach the game (e.g. silent-unseen in DXHR giving much more XP than other approaches).

Not quite sure what that is, but XP by quest progress is still better than just via monster XP.

Still very interesting to get to D:OS2 when I get the chance. Maybe over Christmas…

I bounced off the first game pretty quickly when I found how goofy it was. There’s a fine line for me between “lighthearted” and “doesn’t give a shit about its own setting,” and Original Sin fell on the wrong side of that divide for me. I should really give it another shot.

I’m playing this game in co-op with someone who doesn’t want too much replays and math so we’re playing on easy difficulty. It still means that someone 2 levels higher is very hard to beat forcing us to use ressurection scrolls. 3 level difference means obliteration. 1 level difference gives just a very tense battle. We’re enjoying the game. That problem of understanding which are you should level up in is real but I don’t see it as that big of a problem: enemies are clearly marked. It’s not like, say, Gothic/Risen games where you’re as well given some freedom but will be one-shot by enemies in wrong location. In those games you use save/load to get where you have to go (and thus the hero is incredibly lucky in-universe), in Divinity you see people from afar. It’s great how the game integrates wrong decisions and quests that would look like failed ones into the experience. I mean in any other RPG escaping the fort would probably fail a bunch of quests as you’re now attacked once you get back to the fort – but no, you can still try to do quests in the shadows or even attack the stronghold – which is both possible and completely optional. A lesser RPG would have put you between a hard choice of fighting your way out or looking for magical/stealth solution and would’ve closed out that part of the game once you’re out. DOS2 gives you a real feeling of a playground.

I am too puzzled by the recieval of this game. To me it looks like DOS but a little better. It has voice acting and race selection, but beyond that the real difference I can think of is less bullshit puzzles. And probably more places with people living in them, DOS1 had a more traditional quest hub/wildreness structure IIRC. Perhaps it’s because of calculated meme value due to features like Undead masks and memory canibalism and talking animals.

Glad to have you back. Waiting for your explanation why the next Total War sucks and they all sucked and nobody notices.